Overview:

Powered by state-of-the-art, custom-designed hardware platforms, the Alteon Application Switch ensures the best user experience and fastest response time for mission-critical applications, resulting in effective, continuous business operation. The Alteon 5412, targeting large data centers and carrier environments packed with four 10GE ports, supports up to 20Gbps of throughput capacity, 2.5 Million DNS queries per second, 535K Layer 4 and 300K Layer 7 Transactions per Second.

Alteon Application Switch provides breakthrough performance, advanced application acceleration capabilities and on demand scalability needed to effectively meet contemporary network and business needs. Specifically designed for the majority of enterprises and carriers that operate in dynamic, ever-changing environments and face diverse requirements, the Alteon Application Switch provides the extendable throughput they need from 0 to 80Gbps for unparalleled scalability, business availability and performance.

Breakthrough Performance Delivering Best Quality of Experience

Powered by state-of-the-art, custom-designed hardware platforms, the Alteon Application Switch ensures the best user experience and fastest response time for your mission-critical applications, resulting in effective, continuous business operation.

The beating heart of the Alteon Application Switch is the Virtual Matrix Architecture (VMA), a one-of-a-kind technology that unleashes the power of Alteon's next-generation proprietary platforms. VMA is a fast, robust, and flexible architecture embedding multi-CPU and multi-core components, which leverages the entire system's capacity while providing the parallel performance of distributed processing resulting in linear layer 4-7 scalability.

Integrated Application Acceleration Capabilities

Alteon Application Switch delivers a wide set of application acceleration capabilities including SSL offloading, web compression, caching, HTTP multiplexing and TCP optimization. These capabilities are designed to offload servers, address server performance issues, enhance response-time for best Quality of Experience (QoE) and mitigate security risks. By offloading processor intensive operations from servers, Alteon frees the servers' CPUs to handle additional requests, eliminating the need to buy additional hardware in order to support application processing requirements and reducing CAPEX and OPEX.

The Alteon Application Switch is validated and certified by leading application vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM. When operating Alteon Application Switch with Microsoft SharePoint for example, the response time of SharePoint servers is accelerated by 350% and the servers' CPU load is reduced by 40%. Similar benefits are achieved with other popular applications.

Intelligently Embedding Radware's 'OnDemand' Infrastructure Approach

By embracing Radware's "Pay-as-you-Grow" approach, you only pay for the exact capacity currently required and prevent over-spending on the initial solution. Throughput capacity, acceleration capabilities and application-aware services can be added on demand to meet new business requirements - with no forklift upgrade of the device and without restarting it.

The "Pay-as-you-Grow" approach enables you to overcome capacity planning challenges and reduces the risk associated with data center growth for best investment protection. Thanks to platform standardization and simplicity, there are two platforms to cover all application needs resulting in fewer spare parts, and less training and operations, to dramatically reduce OPEX.

Same Alteon OS

Alteon Application Switch utilizes the same Alteon OS. This means there are no learning curves — related to operations scripts, CLI, integration to environment, network topology considerations — so that you can immediately enjoy the same renowned ease of operation and stability, while obtaining new benefits.

Additional Benefits

Carrier-Grade Reliability
Alteon Application Switch Series 4-5 deliver carrier-grade reliability required by the most demanding carrier application
environments. It features reliable, custom-made hardware coupled with embedded components providing high MTBF and dual
AC/DC power supply configurations. It is NEBS ready, complies with the strictest regulations, and is certified by the most up-todate
hardware and networking standards.

Guaranteed Availability & Secured Management
Alteon Application Switch Series 4-5 provide continuous guaranteed availability of remote management even under extreme
utilization conditions. As the two redundant management ports use a separate, out-of-band management data path, the
management traffic is not affected by the data traffic. For enhanced security, the management ports are isolated from the traffic
ports. Moreover, the management ports can work in redundant mode for high availability1.

Enhanced Configuration
The Alteon Series 4-5 front-panel USB port allows for easy installation, recovery and upgrade of the software as well as
configuration back-up for enhanced management. It also features a convenient LCD Panel for display of key performance statistics2.

1 Available in 4416 & 5412, and can be configured in the 4408 via software configuration2 Available in 4416 & 5412

Features and Benefits:

Availability

Smart Health Monitoring and Failure Detection

Quickly identifies failures at any point along the application or transaction path and reacts proactively

Improves response times by fetching static and dynamic content from local cache (rather than server) through optimal caching time calculation, object versioning mechanism and browser cache optimization

Consolidates or reduces server utilization and operation costs up to 40%

Improves response times by fetching static and dynamic content from local cache (rather than server) through optimal caching time calculation, object versioning mechanism and browser cache optimization

Enables visibility across the entire network via the management dashboard which continuously monitors and displays application delivery services and system status, detects network and application faults as well as showcases statistics and trends

Radware's ADC-VX is designed from the ground up to ensure complete fault isolation, network isolation and management isolation between neighboring virtual ADC instances. By providing this unique isolation architecture that is similar to dedicated physical ADC devices, Radware ADC-VX eliminates the risks involved with consolidation and physical to virtual (P2V) migration. In addition, the entire network layer is virtualized and private – including interfaces, VLANs, ARP and routing tables, which ensures that traffic is routed through isolated paths for maximum privacy.

Predictable Performance & SLA Guarantee

A unique resource guarantee mechanism ensures that each virtual ADC instance is allocated dedicated resources for its operation. This way, every virtual instance can utilize only those resources for which it was specifically allocated, resulting in predictable performance and service level agreement (SLA) guarantee for each instance. This approach completely eliminates the risks of resource starvation even under the most challenging scenarios. For example, a flash crowd event on one of the virtual instances will not affect the performance of other instances.

Full Business Agility

Instant provisioning, decommissioning and resource reallocation of virtual instances running on top of the ADC-VX drives business agility by significantly shortening the deployment time of new applications and services in the virtualized data center. Radware's ADC-VX makes it easy to reallocate resources and distribute them across virtual ADC instances, adjusting their performance and functionality to meet changing business needs.

Simple to Operate & Manage

ADC-VX hypervisor assigns physical resources such as CPU, memory, network and acceleration resources to capacity units, which are allocated to the virtual ADC instances by a simplified resource abstraction mechanism. This automatic process eliminates complicated calculation and reduces human errors. In addition, the centralized management system and dashboard provide a real-time view of the virtual instances' health and resource utilization, resulting in a scalable solution that is simple to operate and manage.

Radware's Virtual Application
Delivery Infrastructure (VADI)

ADC-VX is a key component in Radware's VADI architecture which transforms computing resources, ADC and virtualization services into an integrated, agile and scalable Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure (VADI). It is designed to bridge across the underlying hardware resources and to cater for the various application needs in terms of SLA and performance predictability while delivering maximal agility to the application delivery space. Radware VADI transforms standard application delivery infrastructure into a virtual application delivery control plane.

Complete Application SLA Assurance
with Next Generation Service

ADC-VX solution is built on Radware's Alteon NG platforms - our next-generation application delivery solution. It's the industry's only ADC built from the ground up to ensure application SLA at all times. Alteon NG innovatively leverages several next-generation services that are not available in any other ADC on the market.

Architecturally designed to ensure application SLA by delivering resource reservation and full isolation per application

Traditional hosting and cloud infrastructures are required to offer their customers solutions to overcome challenges associated with the offpremise hosting of business applications and the subsequent lack of control over the compute infrastructure hosting these applications. Radware's solution enables providers to offer scale-out services and highly available application hosting and additional application performance services to their customers. In addition, it offers cloud burst, cloud disaster recovery and cloud based application developing and testing services to enhance the enterprise application lifecycle options.

The Challenge

Cloud computing is quickly becoming a common option for offering cost effective hosting services, effectively making computational power available for a much greater number of use cases and applications. However, the need for highly reliable, high performance service guarantees is not going away, further more with cloud technologies organizations are looking to find a way and improve the economics of compute while retaining the level of service they have gotten used to in their internal data centers. Cloud and hosting providers are challenged to offer their customers a hybrid approach in which high assurance and high economics merge.

Application Delivery in general and load balancing in particular are fundamental components of the hosted virtual application. Effectively, the systems composition that constructs applications running in virtually hosted or cloud infrastructures must use the load balancer as an integral component of the solution. Load balancers enable scaling out of cloud applications by adding virtual machines to an application, and build high-availability into applications by continuously healthmonitoring the virtual machines and forwarding traffic only to healthy ones. That being the case, it is a basic requirement for cloud providers to offer load balancing services as part of their overall infrastructure.

For Enterprise Applications, basic load balancing is not sufficient. Enterprise applications and web applications in particular, are typically not designed out of the box to cope with today's QoE requirements. End users connect from a variety of locations globally with a variety of devices over a variety of networks. Controlling the experience resulting from the variety of application usage patterns as well as dealing with application lifecycle related changes, requires advanced application level capabilities. Some of these capabilities are application acceleration, caching of static content, application L7 policy enforcement, and security functionality. Enterprise applications are commonly built with these capabilities implemented on an ADC front ending the application.

Cloud and hosting providers are required to offer solutions that meet the capability and price requirements of business customer's at large scale with native multi-tenant support and very operationally efficient management systems. Consequently the ability to add advanced ADC functionality into existing load balancing services, potentially as a premium service offering, is valuable in creating additional revenue streams and building differentiated solutions to better fit the provider customers. Radware's Application Delivery Fabric uniquely addresses the cloud and hosting provider requirements by presenting an opportunity to increase revenues and attract more customers.

The Radware ADC Fabric Cloud and Hosting Solution

The solution enables providers to build their own basic load balancing farm supporting scale-out and high availability for hosted applications. Additionally, the solution offers a service level continuum allowing providers to move tenants from basic load balancing services on to advanced application delivery services with a variety of capabilities. At the heart of the Radware cloud and hosting application delivery solution is the ability to rollout application delivery services, based on profiles which comprehensively represent the specific capabilities and capacity provided to the end users over multi-tenant, fully isolated, purpose built hardware, ADC-VX, and over commodity off –the- shelf virtualized hardware. The solution easily integrates into OSS and BSS tools with a RESTful API and plug-ins available for leading commercial cloud platforms. This integration makes the application delivery service operations, the management of all ADC resources, and server resources available for ADC services, very straightforward and intuitive. Cloud and hosting providers can easily scale their ADC service capacity by adding additional purpose built ADC-VX systems or by allocating additional general purpose, x86 based resource pools. Through Radware's Application Delivery Service Automation Plugin, vDirect, providers are relieved from managing all application delivery resources and interface only with an abstraction layer that natively responds to cloud and datacenter service requests and workflows.

The solution is comprised of the following Radware products:

Radware Alteon ADC-VX – Industry leading ADC Virtualization technology running the industry's highest number of virtual ADC instances on a single platform. The ADC-VX platform offers full resource isolation, network isolation, fault isolation and management isolation between all virtual ADC instances best suiting the multi-tenant operation in a cloud environment. ADC VX is a core resource of the Radware ADC Fabric solution.

Radware Alteon VA – fully capable enterprise grade Virtual ADC Appliance running over all major hypervisor platforms such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Open XEN, and RedHat KVM. The product runs the exact same firmware as the hardware versions of the Alteon ADC, providing a unified interface for management, operation and automation across the complete ADC fabric. Alteon VA is a resource in the Alteon ADC Fabric.

Radware vDirect – Automating the processes related to the ADC services in the hosting and cloud infrastructure. ADC services include adding tenants using predefined application optimized templates or provider customized templates, in any deployment model onto the ADC fabric, activating services for tenants and migrating services or tenants across resources of the ADC fabric. vDirect simplifies the ongoing operations while flexibly integrating into the cloud & hosting provider management systems.

The following image illustrates the Radware ADC Fabric components in the cloud and Hosting datacenter.

Service Model

Deployed Product

Description

Assured Application Delivery

Alteon ADC-VX

Due to the industry leading virtual ADC instance density of the Alteon ADC-VX platform, and in turn the economical pricing of each virtual ADC instance, ADC-VX is the ideal platform to offer cloud and hosting tenants a fully isolated high assurance ADC service which can either be provider managed or tenant managed.

Flexible Application Delivery

Alteon VA

For less demanding and more flexible usage environments, the Alteon VA can offer the ideal solution. It is ideally suited to offer very granular application control and configurations are fully compatible with assured application delivery services for future migration.

Shared Load Balancing

Alteon ADC-VX

For basic load balancing services, in which the tenant is assigned an IP address representing its application, a shared load balancing hardware appliance, running virtual IP per customer application, offers the best price performance combination. Alteon ADC-VX technology allows providers to group services flexibly and isolates service environments from one another.

According to the above service models, Radware has developed a unique business model by which more flexible pricing, billing and licensing options, offering better alignment with end user billing, is available for cloud and hosting providers. Additionally, according to the specific service offerings of the cloud and hosting provider, Radware offers joining the Cloud partner program which provides further benefits.

Features and Benefits

The key benefits of the Radware ADC Fabric Solution for Cloud and Hosting Providers are the ability to offer a very broad spectrum of load balancing and application delivery services to its customer while maintaining the ability to very specifically define the solution sets that make most sense to the specific cloud and hosting business. Such flexibility enables better addressing end user requirements, better alignment of services to the requirements and the potential to create additional revenues through offering high SLA services at a very economical price point.

Some of the solution features are listed as follows:

Granular, operator defined Application Delivery Service definition

Highly scalable Application Delivery Controller Fabric

T hroughput Capacity

T enant Support

N etwork Services

Intuitive integration and Service Automation in Cloud and Hosting Infrastructure

Highly Scalable, Dense multi-tenant ADC Appliances

Very broad hypervisor technology support to suit your cloud platform

Identical functionality and operations model across form factors and service delivery models

Summary

Understanding the close relationship between cloud infrastructure services and managed hosting services with regards to how they apply to enterprise customers that are considering adopting cloud services, Radware offers the most scalable high assurance multi-tenant application delivery services platform in the market. With Radware's ADC Fabric solutions, providers can offer a broad variety of load balancing and Application delivery services custom defined to address their customers' requirements. Radware's solution supports easy migration of customer service levels with a minimal operational overhead on the provider operation. By offering a variety of services, the providers can increase the revenue per customer and the commitment level of their customers.

In alignment with the hosting and cloud infrastructure markets, Radware extends special partnership programs and uses a special business model with cloud and hosting providers. Radware's cloud and hosting business model reduces risk and upfront investment by providers while enabling creation of custom and granular application delivery service profile offerings to the provider customers.